New publication: Social Ventures - Built to Scale

Author:

Patrick Shine

Growth (or “scaling”) is difficult. It is difficult in the commercial sector, where businesses and their stakeholders are largely aligned around the objectives of profit-driven growth. These difficulties are compounded in the social sector, where business models are often unproven, surpluses can be harder to attain, and many leaders and stakeholders still doubt the benefits of going for scale.

Despite these challenges, consensus is beginning to build around scaling as a way of maximising social impact and creating change at a system level. At The Shaftesbury Partnership we build scalability into the social ventures we launch, and drive them to scale nationally. We see this as the best way of achieving our mission, to create and inspire trailblazing social reforms that empower communities by tackling disadvantage and generating opportunity. Through our experience of scaling innovative and effective solutions to social problems we have learnt many lessons, and developed key insights about how to achieve scale in the social sector. Our new paper seeks to share our approach, illustrated through our experiences of two ventures, The Challenge Network and The Trussell Trust Foodbanks.